She Wondered
by unperfectwolf
Summary: Het, Minerva McGonagall.Tom Riddle . oneshot . She wondered what it would have been like if her son had lived.


**She Wondered  
By** unperfectwolf  
**Archive:** sure, that's cool  
**Rated:** Pg  
**Fandom, Pairing:** Harry Potter Un. JK Rowling, Minerva McGonagall/it's a surprise!  
**Summary: **"She wondered what it would have been like if her son had lived."  
**Disclaimer:** not mine, never was mine, never will be mine. all is jk rowling's.  
**For:** Violet Quill's "Voices and Vaginas of HP Women" challenge  
**Author's Note:** While the challenge was for a first person, I didn't single third. I couldn't pull it off in first- I did try, several times. And this isn't beta'd, because my betas seemed to drop off the face of the earth. So… Sorry.  
**Word Count: **674

**SHE WONDERED**

She had been around for longer than most of the others, not that they noticed. She looked young for her age, maybe forty-five, when she was in her seventies. No one seemed to notice that she just continued on in what was seemingly dubbed her rightful place, watching as people filtered in and out of her life.

She had been the head of Gryffindor for nearly forty-five years now. She had watched children walk in and out of her life, many promising to keep in touch, few ever bothering to write. She wondered, deep inside, what it would have been like to be the parent of one of the children that she watched go off into the world, off to do great deeds and see great people.

She wondered what it would have been like if her son had lived.

She knew, deep down, it was best that her son hadn't lived past his first birthday, that if he'd gone and grown up and become a wizard he'd have followed his in his father's footsteps. His father's allure was too great, his love for his son still to much at the time. She wondered though, if her son had lived, would his father have gone down the path he did?

She would never know, though in her dreams she saw a different outcome each night. She wondered if there were any empaths in the most recent batch of students; her dreams had been getting worse and worse in the last few years.

When her son, whom she'd named Jove, was born, she had been like any other mother, happy, stated… She felt like she could take on the world, if only for the small child she held in her arms.

But it was not to be.

She had turned her head to what Jove's father was doing, had turned away from the signs she knew, let the rot fester… Out of love for her son, she had stayed with her husband and let him infest her too.

She hadn't known when she had married him what she had wanted to do. And because she had thought that she might want to do something in politics, she had kept her last name. He had agreed with her, at the time, though over the years it would become one of the things that drove him away from her. Had she known then that it would drive him away from her, she might have taken his.

If she had, she would have long since been dead now.

Now, though, she was tired, so very tired, and as his birthday came ever closer, she wondered what it would have been like to have a son, to have a family, to have made it work. She wondered what it would have been like if their family had worked.

What the world would be like if their family had worked.

Would Lilly and James Potter, two of her own students, two of the children she had helped raise for seven years, still have been alive if her son had lived? Would Sirius Black still be alive? Would Peter Pettigrew have turned on his friends?

There was the possibility that if her son had lived, his father would never have become the monster he was and the whole wizarding world would have lived happily ever after. There was also the chance that she would have succumbed, out of love for her son, to his father's ways. Would they have survived, with out her knowledge of his mind?

She could see Harry Potter now, as he moved amongst the other children, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley following him, and wondered if she would hate him when he killed her husband.

Because, no matter that she hadn't seen him face to face since she had left him, three days after their son's death in '54, she was still married to Tom Riddle. She wondered, did that make her Lady Voldemort?

She wondered what it would have been like if her son had lived.

_Finished 14 April 2005._


End file.
